The Panid

Computer networking allows billions of long-dead authors and living professionals to collaborate in the world’s most perfect epic poem: The Panid

INTERNET — Today the Arch-Primate of the Camelot Online University announced the results of an intensive new study. Hundreds of thousands of competent and accredited colleagues in thousands of diverse fields participated in the study, combing through the entire corpus of written human dialogue at least three times over, looking for accidental descriptions of future events, gems of beauty, or other pieces of interest they felt like upvoting in the purpose-built PanidBook social media web site, a decentralized not-for-profit digital communal space and an often criticized “first-ocracy” investing unwarranted power in the hands of people who were the first in their field to join the website.

The results of the project have been described as astounding, beautiful, and profoundly disturbing. Critics of the study have rightly pointed out that the parameters of the social media itself were determinate to a large extent in the resulting poem and that by no means does this study “prove” that such a thing as foreknowledge exists, a belief which follows the demented exaggerations of the paranoid mainstream news media.

However, according to the Arch-Primate’s reading of the study’s poem and the associated esoteric texts, if knowledge were to be something which in fact existed, then it would only be provable as such through the prediction of future events. But this was not the aim of the project, and critics say it was a narrative selected by forces of a Reddit-style upvoting market driven by the tendencies of the study’s participants and not at all the “truth.” They also suggest that the Arch-Primate has insisted on a method for stitching a story together which matches his vision and the closely aligned vision of the many thousands of subforum moderators.

As is well documented, the study’s original aim was in fact to perform, in The Arch-Primate’s words, a “survey of narrative epistemology establishing a canon of pure truth within the system of epic poetry.” The seven volume Panid is set to hit the shelves of Barnes and Noble next December, as the Panid is an ongoing project which is self-refining and not yet ready, as the Arch-Primate explained, “It would not be responsible to release it yet for public consumption. Already our colleagues in fractal geography have been able to chart a pattern approximated in the Panid’s construction forming a nearly perfect correlation with known laws of physics, and with a few minor changes we may be able to complete the project and pass it into the hands of theoretical physicists. Using computer modeling, they will be able to write the narrative of the future and perhaps even prehistory, today. It may be the stuff legends are made of.”